LEADERSHIP development — picking the brightest staff and turning them into tomorrow’s organisational overlords — has become one of the unquestionable “good things” of corporate life. Now new research might indicate otherwise.
It is easy to see why leadership has become such a popular idea. The L-word implies military grandeur and excitement, conjuring images of a world of corporate conquest, battle and ultimate victory.
But selecting smart folk for hot-housing into high-pressure heroes can backfire badly, says new research. A study in this month’s Psychological Science says that people who perform tasks better than their colleagues in normal circumstances fall apart faster when the pressure is on. The Miami University study identified people with “high working memory capacity” (bright sparks who use lots of their brains) and put them in a maths test with people with “ low working memory capacity”.
Predictably, the eggheads thrashed the normals at first, but then the psychologists piled on the pressure, telling participants they would receive cash rewards if they got the answers right — and that they were being videotaped for analysis. The boffins’ performances crashed. The ordinaries’ results were unaffected.
So, can you create leaders — or are they born? Genghis Khan and Joe Stalin probably weren’t that bright, and never went on leadership courses. The old Japanese Imperial Army knew a thing about natural leaders, too. When it captured British troops after the fall of Singapore in the Second World War, it corralled them into groups of about two dozen mixed ranks and watched them.
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The guards waited until natural leaders emerged from the chaos — about one person in 20 would be one, went the Japanese theory. But once they had identified nature’s born leaders, they did not select them for fast-track training into senior jobs: they took them out and shot them.